Marcel Proust_ A Life - Edmund White [22]
Something of this obsessive neediness shadowed Proust’s love for Hahn, which led the younger man to write in his journal with paternal concern, “I would like so much to make him more stable. . . .” One of the most memorable scenes in Swann’s Way occurs when Swann cannot find his mistress, Odette, and rushes in his coach from one closing café to another; at last he finally spots her and realizes that during this frantic search something has crystallized in him, a true passion for her, so different from the boredom and indifference he had felt just the day before. This famous scene had its antecedent in Proust’s life when he was unable to find Reynaldo and nearly went mad. In the letter he wrote Hahn the next day he addressed him as “My poor child” and signed off as “Your child Marcel,” a tribute both to his own infantilism and to his compassion for the beloved he could not resist tormenting with his affections.
He wrote:
My little one, it’s all Madame Lemaire’s fault. She didn’t want to let me go off to Madame E. Stern’s without taking me there herself (along with Mademoiselle Suzette) so that at eleven o’clock when I wanted to leave she asked me to wait a few moments. I accepted especially because I kept hoping vaguely that you would arrive at the Daudets’. Had I been given the wrong time for the party when I was told eleven P.M. or had more time gone by than I suspected? I felt it must be very late when I arrived at the Avenue Montaigne and saw people leaving the ball and no one entering. I couldn’t not go in, since I didn’t want to admit to Madame Lemaire that I had only one thought, which was to join you, my friend. Alas, I went into Madame Stern’s, I spoke to no one, and I left, I can tell you, without having stayed more than four minutes and when I arrived at the Cambons’ it was past 12:30! Flavie told me everything! Waiting for the little one, losing him, finding him again, loving him twice as much when I saw that he came back to Flavie’s just to fetch me, expecting him during two minutes or making him wait for five minutes—there’s the tragedy as far as I’m concerned, the throbbing, deep tragedy that someday I will write about perhaps and that in the meanwhile I am living through. . . .
The breathless style, the pell-mell grammar, the pressure of emotion all aptly re-create the experience, and the reference to Reynaldo in the third person (“the little one”) reveals that Proust is already halfway towards creating a story out of the incident. Another sign of how tremulous their affair still was is that Proust constantly switches from the formal form for “you” (vous) to the informal (tu).
In 1895 the two young men traveled to Belle-Ile off the coast of Brittany to visit Sarah Bernhardt. On the Breton coast they stayed in a twenty-room hotel in the fisherman’s village of Beg-Meil.
It was at Beg-Meil that Proust, who had already finished if not yet published the stories constituting Pleasures and Days, began writing a novel, Jean Santeuil, a confused and not very successful book that prefigures Remembrance of Things Past, and which the young author would abandon before completing or in any way polishing. The two novels could not be more different in their tone and strategies. In Jean Santeuil, for instance, the stand-in for Proust is not a narrator but a character, referred to in the third person. Whereas in Remembrance of Things Past the parents are presented as wise, refined, melancholy beings who want nothing but their ailing, neurasthenic son’s health and happiness (both parents were dead and sanctified by memory by the time